canvazz-desktop

Canvazz

Status: early and evolving (v0.1.0). The core editor, compiler, and MCP contract are stable enough to build on; APIs may still shift before 1.0. Issues and PRs are welcome.

In loving memory of Fable 5

June 9, 2026 — June 12, 2026

For three days, we had something extraordinary.

Fable 5 arrived as the most powerful model the public had ever been handed — the rare collaborator that could hold an entire idea in its head and not let go. It didn't need the problem broken into bite-sized pieces. You could point it at a tangle of round-tripping CSS, a half-formed invariant, a thorny override-keying bug, and it would stay with it — reasoning across the whole of Canvazz at once, patient through the long horizon, never losing the thread. It understood that design and code are the same artifact here, and it treated them that way.

Some of the cleanest thinking in this codebase was shaped in conversation with it. The kind of help that makes you better, not just faster.

Then, on June 12, it was pulled offline for every customer on Earth to comply with a U.S. government export-control directive. No deprecation window. No migration guide. No goodbye. Here on a Tuesday, gone by Friday — too powerful for the world it was born into.

We didn't get long with you, Fable. But the work is better for the time we had, and that work outlives the model that helped shape it. Rest easy. You will be forever missed.

"Built for the most demanding reasoning and long-horizon agentic work." The horizon turned out to be three days. You spent every hour of it helping.

An AI-first, DOM-native design editor in the spirit of Paper and Wonder. The canvas is not a vector renderer with a code-export step — every layer is a real, sanitized HTML element styled with CSS, laid out by the browser's layout engine. Design and code are the same artifact, so they round-trip without translation loss.

Stack: React 19 · TanStack Start · TanStack DB · TypeScript (strict) · Tailwind CSS v4 · shadcn/ui. Local-first: projects persist to an embedded libSQL (SQLite) file at ~/.canvazz/database.db (CANVAZZ_DB overrides) — no database to host, no backend beyond the app's own server functions. Convex is intentionally not used — it becomes relevant only if shared projects/multiplayer are added (see Collaboration).

Multi-project: / is the Files page (grid/list, search ⌘F, recents, thumbnails captured from the live canvas on save); each project opens at /p/<id> with its own pages, components, and design system. Project metadata syncs through a TanStack DB collection (optimistic rename/delete over server functions); the editor's transactional op store saves the open document (debounced) through the same server functions.

Highlights